Abstract

Friday, January 20, 2017

A president to admire

This
week’s post has little to do with Alzheimer’s, other than the act of writing
and reading on a daily basis is a means of keeping my mind sharp. In a typical
evening at home, I will read for one or two hours. Over the past month I’ve
been engrossed in Jean Edward Smith’s 766-page biography of Dwight D.
Eisenhower.

Why Ike? After all, the fifties are often remembered as an
age of stultifying conformity, shoehorned between the heroic war years and the upheavals
of the sixties. Long before Eisenhower was elected president, in 1952, he had
far-reaching international experience, having been stationed in Paris, the Panama
Canal zone, and the Philippines–this all long before World II broke out. And he
was the architect, of course, of the largest amphibious landing in the history
of war. Unlike two other famous World War II generals—George Patton and Douglas
MacArthur—Ike had a healthy ego, not an oversized one.

Smith describes Eisenhower as a “progressive
conservative.” Is this a contradiction in terms? Another way to put it is to say
that the changes Eisenhower brought about came at a slower pace than under FDR
or Lyndon Johnson. After the war—and the emergence of the Cold War—Eisenhower
was the principal architect of NATO. Ike was no hawk. He was not involved in
the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Harry Truman
was the president then—but later he commented, “it wasn’t necessary to hit them
with that awful thing.” MacArthur, on the other hand, appears to have favored using
atomic weapons during the Korean War.

By the time Eisenhower came into office, the Democrats had
occupied the White House for twenty years. Unlike in our more polarized era, in
the 1950s both parties had liberal and conservative wings. In 1952, when
Eisenhower was serving as the president of Columbia University, both the Democrats
and Republicans sought him to be their nominee. He chose the GOP. But there is
no question that many of his views and policies had a liberal or
internationalist slant. He defended General George Marshall, the architect of
“The Marshall Plan,” the infusion of $12 billion (more than $120 billion in
today’s economy) to stabilize Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Rarely
before or since has public money been so effectively deployed.

To the extent that there were problems on the way to the
presidency, they were provided by Richard Nixon, Ike’s running mate. Nixon,
then a fierce anti-communist, was on the ticket to placate the party’s right
wing. Ike was never fully comfortable with Nixon as his running mate, and when
Nixon became involved in a campaign-funding scandal, Eisenhower was intending
to drop him. But Eisenhower, in a rare episode of poor judgement, permitted
Nixon to address the nation, and Nixon’s maudlin “Checkers” speech—“Checkers”
was Nixon’s young daughter’s dog—turned out to be a national sensation. Thousands
of telegrams arrived overnight, almost all of them urging Eisenhower to keep
Nixon on board.

Smith, whose biography of Eisenhower was published in
2012, describes the 1952 campaign as the nastiest in modern times. J. Edgar
Hoover, the longtime FBI director, was in his evil glory. So was Joseph
McCarthy, the deplorable hunter of alleged Communists and “deviants.”
Eisenhower won in a landslide, helping to discredit McCarthyism and strengthen
the rule of law. But he was stuck with Nixon as his running mate. “From that
point on,” Smith notes, “Eisenhower never trusted Nixon.”

Just months after Ike’s defeat of Democrat Adlai Stevenson,
Eisenhower, fulfilling a campaign pledge, traveled to the Korean Peninsula. The
president’s son, John Eisenhower, was stationed at the front, serving as a
major. This appears not to have been a token gesture. Certainly Ike could have arranged
for his son to have a less risky role, one far from the actual fighting. But this,
I think, points out an essential fact about Eisenhower—his conviction that all Americans
should be treated in the same way.

Much later in his presidency, Eisenhower directed federal
troops to enforce a court directive to desegregate the schools in Birmingham,
Alabama. The decision, Brown v. Board of Education, had profound implications. Until
then, legal doctrine held that “separate but equal” accommodations, in housing,
in public transportation, and in schools, was permissible. A president with
other priorities might have ignored the implications of Brown v. Board and left
it for his successor.

A few years earlier, in 1956, the Eisenhower administration
faced separate geopolitical crises months apart. In Europe, the Soviet Union
sent troops into Hungary to quash a popular uprising, instantly raising the
temperature of the Cold War. A couple of months later, the Eisenhower
administration had to walk a diplomatic high wire between nominal allies France, Britain and
Israel on one side and the United States on the other, concerning the fate of
the Suez Canal, the lifeblood of Middle Eastern commerce, oil in particular.

Most surprising to me is that it was Eisenhower, not some think-tank
guru, who coined the term “military-industrial complex”—Eisenhower’s
understanding that the relationship between defense contractors and government
officials had become much too cozy, to the detriment of democracy. In his farewell
speech, 56 years ago this week, Eisenhower commented, “In the councils of
government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will exists.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger
our liberties or democratic processes,” Eisenhower continued. “We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

And this wasn’t the only time that Eisenhower spoke out on
militarism during his presidency. In 1953, in an early phase of the Cold War,
Eisenhower made a speech that might have been written by a Quaker. The opening
lines were, “Every
gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower, in other words, was pretty much the complete
package—a president who was a champion of civil rights, who didn’t regard
defense spending as a sacred cow, who didn’t overeact to international crises,
who rarely lost his cool. Was he the most accomplished president of the
twentieth century? No, that would be FDR. But Eisenhower was the right
president at the right time.

And what can we say about the man who will become our
president today? Does he have any of the attributes that informed the Eisenhower
administration? Ike’s lack of pomposity? His willingness to treat his own son
as just another soldier? His level-headed decision-making? His fair-mindedness?
His empathy?